Monday, March 21, 2011

Puyallup Steel at Paul Bunyan

Well, we finally got through a steel match without getting frozen, rained out, or blown away! Although it was a bit chilly at times with the ground being frozen at the start, it was overall a pretty nice day in terms of weather. It didn't start raining until we started home.

As to getting to and from the match, there's a story in itself. The Washington State run ferry system has two docks on the Whidbey Island side, but only one on the mainland side, so if they ever need to do dock repairs on the mainland side, they have to shut down the dock. However, just a few miles South on the mainland dock in Mukilteo there is another ferry dock in Edmonds. It's close enough to the Mukilteo - Clinton Route that you can easily see the Edmonds dock just down the shoreline a few miles. When the State decides to shut down the dock in Mukilteo, they run the regular ferry from Clinton, on Whidbey Island, to the Edmonds dock instead. It seems, though, that they try to make the longer run on the same amount of fuel. The normal crossing time is fifteen minutes, but to go a few miles farther South, it takes them fifty minutes! For a big part of the trip the boat wasn't running much over a fast idle! Since they were running the boats much slower, they also had to cut way back on the number of trips per day they could run, potentially causing long waits to get onto a boat. And the ferry system wonders why they are so universally hated by those of use that depend on them as part of our state highway system!

Anyhow, It took us a bit longer to get to the match than it usually does. The Paul Bunyan club only has five pistol bays, so there could only be five stages set up. There were almost 100 entries though, and this for a local club match! Steel shooting is definitely catching on. The large number of shooters meant large squads, and a long day. When the match was over, it was late in the afternoon, and we were all starving, so a few of us headed over to the nearby airport restaurant for a late lunch/early dinner. The food and conversation was great, and it was almost 8pm by the time we hit the road towards home. Not wanting to spend a bunch of time waiting for a ferry, and then an additional fifty minutes to make the crossing, we decided to drive North to Burlington, then West towards Anacortes, and finally South across the Deception Pass bridge to ge to Whidbey Island. From Deception pass it was still another hour to travel the entire length of the Island to the South end to get home. It ended up taking us somewhere almost four hours to get home.

Oh, the match? I forgot about that part! KeeWee wanted to squad with her friend Jeanette, a new shooter from the Kitsap club, and I wanted to shoot with my usual squad mates James and Scott, so we ended up on different squads, but our squads were side by side for most of the day, so we were able to watch each other shoot. She shot very well. Me, not so much.......